This is the first of a few pirate crews I’m putting together. I gifted this one to my godson; I will likely do the same with another; but I’ll be keeping two for my little one. With all of the pirate crews, the overall idea is the same, but the crew members are unique. Pirates…
Category: Playmobil
America’s Team
What’s more American than Cowboys? What’s more American than celebrating diversity? … Maybe football and capitalism and mind-numbing entertainment… I’m joking, of course. I put this group of cowboys together because they did not fit in any of the other western crews I assembled. Then I decided to have fun with it and add a…
Westside Outlaws
The name is a tribute to Tupac, but the crew is based on real outlaws from the days of the wild west. The Westside Outlaws believe in getting money over everything, and they don’t respect any of the laws (or enforcers of laws) meant to stop them. I think it’s pretty common for kids to…
The Enforcers
I’m not doing the “good guy vs. bad guy” thing for my kids, but it should be obvious that this crew is going to be at odds with most of the other crews. Their job is to enforce the laws. They enforce laws to protect people’s possessions and to capture and punish people who have…
Birds of a Feather
Three members of the Apsáalooke (Crow) Nation partner with outsiders who have courage and desire to join their way of life. They protect their homes and go on raids against White settlers to get what they need to survive. Each of the members of this crew is based on a real person from history. With…
Los Bandoleros
Really, they’re not bandits or robbers–at least not if someone is thinking of that term as purely motivated by selfishness. This band of custom Playmobil toys are one of many attempts to help my kid think about the harm of greed and the honor of redistributing wealth in order to benefit the masses. From the…
The Rufus Buck Gang
I was inspired by watching The Harder They Fall (2021). It was really cool to see all these Black people as the central characters in a Western movie and to know that they are all based on real people. I thought, “that’s kind of what I’m doing with these all these Playmobil sets for my…
Golden State Warriors
Did you know that California is named after a fictional Black woman? Montalvo, a Spanish writer from the early sixteenth century, wrote a famous epic tale about Christians fighting against Muslims who were assisted by a warrior Queen named Calafia, her Black women warriors, and her fierce griffins. In Montalvo’s fictional world, Queen Calafia is…
Baby Jesus
My little one is still too young to play with these toys but I decided to make this Nativity scene for him to look at. I hope that we can set it up together next year and that we can talk about the significance of this religious story in fresh and relevant ways every year.
Ghost Dance Resistance
The Ghost Dance has a much more complicated history than I will share here. In short, the dance was part of a spiritual movement in the 19th century that brought together many Native American peoples hoping to bring back spirits of the dead who would make peace on earth and remove the White colonizers. Many…
Blackened Playmobil
Playmobil got a lot of flack a few years ago for a certain pirate ship set that they were selling in which one of the pirates has brown skin and a slave collar around his neck. According to complaints, the toy was racist because “It told my son to put a slave cuff around the…